Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  ‘Really, it does seem incongruous to be sitting here and talking about barbed wire. Let’s try roses instead. Hugo, is that Madame Alfred Carrière?’ Helen’s interjection was welcome. I suppose it is for the hostess to decide whether talking politics at mealtimes is permissible, but the truth was I was getting tired of the subject. Not just nervous, as I had reason to be, but bored. It wasn’t as though anyone present actually had any new information to impart, and since we’d been harping on Berlin all morning, as we passed, in repeatedly reforming groups, from terrace to pool to the deckchairs laid out beneath the pergola, the airing of purely speculative views had become tedious.

  Hugo began to replan Helen’s London garden for her, using the crumbs of Bath Oliver biscuits as rose-bushes, and a twisted napkin to represent a serpentine path. Lunch ended, the two of them crossed to the sunken garden beyond the screen of wisteria so that he could show her his favourite hybrid musks. His doting shadow followed – little Nell. And so, after a pause during which she listened to an exchange of banter between Flossie and Benjie (now fast friends) with that air of oh-so-flatteringly rapt attention that Christopher and I were probably the only people present to know was fake, did Lil.

  Lil

  Night time is the right time … Wrong. So wrong. The right time is this time. After-lunch-time. Siesta sexta hora sixth hour sex hour. Christopher in Seville leaning across the table to stroke my inner elbow with his long olive fingers. The frisson. I had never even known that elbows … So smooth, his chest. No hair. Seeing him in the tiny bathtub in that hotel with the shoeshine boys bleating outside our window. The shock of the beauty of a naked man, enormous in that cramped bathroom, like a fox trapped in a hutch. The table he leant across was covered with little dishes. The kidneys oozing blood and the potatoes chequered with red chilli. The white rubber rings of calamari. So fastidious, so neat. His green linen jacket spotless, the sleeve avoiding all that spiced oil, his hand cool touching that place, that part of me I had never paid attention to, which had kept secret, even from me, its astonishing capacity for pleasure. How did he know to do that? His creation perhaps, conjuring up nerve endings just so that he could set them trembling. Looking into his eyes. Now I understand about that. You hold yourself together by looking into a man’s eyes, like watching the verge at night to prevent yourself driving into the oncoming car. Oncoming swoon. That was fifteen years ago and he still wears those pale, pale green jackets. His clothes always the same, as though he doesn’t care about them, but actually because he does care very much. He’s wearing one now.

  So why am I here, crossing this lawn, exposed by the sun like a robber exposed by a policeman’s torch? Glaring. Jeering. Silly Lily. I’m as much of a fool for Hugo as his dog and his daughter. Five years younger than me. A perfectly nice wife. He walks off and fat yellow Wully heaves himself up and follows. And so does Nell. And, oh Lord how shaming, so do I.

  *

  Alone together (Heather had walked down to the cottages to spend her afternoon off with her friend Sharon Armstrong, Mrs Ferry had washed up lunch and bicycled home), Chloe and Dickie lay flat on their backs on a tartan rug. They were falling upward into space.

  ‘There’s a star, there’s a star, oh Mummy hold tight.’

  He was gripping Chloe’s second and third finger – as much of her hand as he could get into his fist – so hard her ring dug painfully into her bone, but she didn’t try to extricate herself. Dickie was certainly not going to let go. Up was down and down was up and he was plummeting front-first into vacancy that went on and on for ever.

  ‘It’s very very cold, isn’t it? It’s so cold we might die. Our noses might drop off. You won’t let go, will you? A a a a a …’ He was dipping his head from side to side.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Chloe, sounding as distant as though they really were drifting apart, connected only by a safety line, in danger of losing each other in a lightless wilderness of something that wasn’t even air. She was close to falling asleep. Because Hugo and Nell were up at Wychwood she and her little boy had had their secret best lunch: potted shrimps on toast, then strawberry jelly and custard with Battenberg cake – a composition in pink and yellow, Dickie’s favourite colours, with top-of for a treat. Not that he’d ever wear pink, or anything girly. Thank goodness he had male cousins, otherwise everything would have had to be new. Mrs Hollis at the garage made Nell’s dresses out of things Mrs Rossiter gave them. They were always too small for Chloe, so that embarrassment was spared. At parties Nell was snazzy in swirl-patterned Pucci silk or beige broderie anglaise, Lil’s sleek shifts remade with incongruous puffed sleeves and sashes.

  ‘There are things,’ said Dickie squeakily. His head was slapping from side to side. ‘They’re going to hit me.’ He was trying to curl himself up into a ball.

  Chloe pulled herself back to full consciousness. Dickie was exasperatingly good at getting himself into a state. ‘Spaceship to spaceman Dickie,’ she said in a robotic voice. ‘Spaceship to spaceman Dickie. We’re bringing you back into the ship. Relax. Relax. Relax.’ Dickie’s head was still now. ‘Those things you’re worried about, Dickie. We know what they are. We can see some space-marbles whizzing around you now. That’s a very rare occurrence. Just look at them, Dickie. Aren’t they wonderful colours? Aren’t they like bits of rainbow?’

  Dickie’s eyes opened wide – he loved his collection of marbles too much ever to play with them. They were laid out on a solitaire board on his bedroom floor so he could see them first thing in the morning, just by leaning out of bed. ‘Space-marbles aren’t hard like earth-marbles. They fly about very fast and furious, but they’re more like bubbles really. They can’t hurt you. Now go completely limp, spaceman Dickie, and we’re going to pull you in through the hatch. And spacedog Mummy will be coming in first to show you how.’

  She sat and then stood, and held up her arms, hands with palms together, as though for a dive, to make herself narrow enough to pass easily through a porthole. Dickie did the same, and slipped feet first into the spaceship. ‘We’re safe. We’re safe. We’re safe,’ he sang, to the tune of ‘The Farmer’s In His Den’ and they took each other’s hands and span five times round to celebrate their return from the aching cold and dark of intergalactic space to the familiar setting of sundial and parched lawn.

  ‘Can we go to the secret pond?’ said Dickie. Only just back from one adventure, and perhaps aware that he hadn’t acquitted himself entirely heroically, he wanted another one immediately.

  ‘Socks and boots on then,’ said Chloe. She had once seen a grass snake where they were going next, and although she really did believe it was a grass snake, well, it could have been an adder. She didn’t mention snakes to the children at all. Just said that they had to wear boots in the forest because of nettles.

  ‘I like the bottoms of gumboots,’ said Dickie as he struggled into them. ‘They look like sweets.’

  ‘They do, don’t they,’ said Chloe, and they each had a fruit gum in honour of their boots – yellow for him, purple for her.

  From Wood Manor’s upper lawn they could step through a narrow gate into the paddock where Silver and his friend Cinderella stood knee-deep in grass. When Hugo took Nell out for a ride, Cinderella, who was a donkey, ran along behind them like a big bony dog. The idea had been that Dickie would learn to ride on her, but whenever anyone mounted her she bucked. ‘I don’t think I like riding,’ said Dickie, his lips mauve with fear, and Hugo, who found teaching his children less fun than he’d imagined it might be, added ‘Pony for Dickie’ to his list of things to do one of these days, which might mean never.

  The paddock formed a crescent around the garden, and beyond it the forest began. They passed through a tunnel of rhododendrons, then out into one of the broad avenues where nothing much grew under the huge beech trees to either side.

  ‘Heather says the trees are thousands and thousands of years old.’

  ‘Only about a quarter of one thousand,’ said Chloe, and then wished she hadn�
��t.

  They held hands. Dickie hummed, a monotonous little noise as peaceful as bee-buzz. It was rare for them to be alone together like this. Why, wondered Chloe, do I pay Heather to have these precious times with the children? What on earth do I do all day long?

  Ten minutes brought them to the tree whose low-hanging branch made a horse the children could ride. Dickie sat on it and bounced. ‘It’s all mine today,’ he said, and then was quiet. Nell’s absence made this afternoon easy, but also just a little dull. Chloe sat in the roots of the tree, absently cleaning her fingernails with a twig. In their own personae they were not sure how to talk to each other. She thought, with anguish, Only two years and he’ll have to go away to school. In a clearing beyond the riding-tree a shaft of sunlight was full of insects, a pillar of twitching radiance rising from the bracken. Chloe thought, This is boring, and, This is what makes me happy.

  Twelve trees further down the avenue – Dickie picked up a single leaf under each one, which was how he’d learnt to count – they turned onto the narrow path to the ruin of a garden.

  One of Wychwood’s long-ago owners had had it made as a present for his wife. Outside the park, it must have represented quite an excursion for her, even though the wrought-iron gate was still visible behind them, spanning the ride. She and her friends would come in a pony-trap, with parasols, and a cart following bringing hampers, and her musicians. There was even a miniature ice-house there in the woods, so that wine and apricots could be chilled ready for her repast.

  Chloe and Dickie scrambled over the broken-down wall. Inside there were tall dark trees which emitted a scent peculiar to this place, and a little trellised pavilion whose copper-clad dome was bright with verdigris, and in front of it the empty saucer of a dried-up pond.

  Dead centre of the dry pond lay a thumb-thick black snake, as neatly coiled as a Catherine wheel. Chloe stopped short. Never show the children you’re afraid. Dickie slipped his hand away and threw himself onto the verge and began to roll. The game was to tumble around and around the pond’s sloping clay sides until gravity pulled you down into the middle. For Nell’s last birthday Hugo had borrowed the roulette wheel that Mr Slatter manned at the village fête, and the children had played for Smarties. ‘Faites vos jeux! Faites vos jeux!’ yelled Dickie now, tipping himself over the pond’s rim. Chloe dropped to her knees, and lunged down grabbing him roughly by the shoulders. He burst into tears. The snake, quite slowly, unwound itself, took a look at them and then was gone in a flicker.

  Dickie saw it. ‘I want to go home! I want to go home!’ he shouted.

  So did Chloe. Carrying him as though he was a baby, she hauled Dickie over the wall, and didn’t put him down again until they were back in the beech avenue. There, the afternoon’s second shock, there where they had never before seen anyone they didn’t know, anyone who didn’t work for Wychwood, and therefore in a way for Dickie’s father, they saw coming towards them over the sun-spotted beech mast, lots of people, perhaps twenty, with big sticks.

  *

  Up at Wychwood Helen was paying serious attention, but being sparing of her compliments, which all three of her interlocutors – perhaps most of all Nell, who knew how much her father and Mrs R cared for the rose garden – found hard.

  ‘You see,’ said Hugo, ‘the springwater is pumped up into the canal, then flows through a hidden ditch to drive this fountain, then runs through a buried pipe to feed the pond in the kitchen garden and trickles on down to the lake. What we really want to do is to have another go at getting the fountain at the head of the home lake to spout. As far as I can make out Norris and his fellows just couldn’t get it working, but the original plans are stupendous.’

  As Hugo spoke, in Lil’s mind’s eye there were white founts falling in the courts of the sun. The Moors’ marvellous irrigation channels set quicksilver streams gushing across the red hillsides of Andalucia. Poems inscribed on rose petals floated along marble-paved channels from one alabaster-panelled pavilion to another. Lemon groves spread their sharp sweet fragrance. Cithars twanged. Striped silk robes fell back to reveal the flash of damascened scimitars. Burnished flies by the myriad settled on mounds of decapitated Crusader heads.

  Helen, to whom the hydraulic arrangements of Wychwood’s garden summoned up no such vision, looked vacant. Hugo brought himself back to the local wonders. ‘The spring’s magic, you know. We have to let the witches in to fill their medicine bottles from it.’ Nell knew this was a fact. Mrs Slatter, who bicycled up to Wood Manor with cream and butter on Wednesdays, and could cure everyone else’s warts but could do nothing about the funny lumps on her own chin, was one of the witches. The other was Mrs Slatter’s sister Mrs Leatherset, but she was known to be mad, and to have gone for her husband with a carving knife. She was no longer asked to wash up after dinner parties.

  Helen ignored the mention of witches, which she took to be a sop to the credulous (Nell). She really was, to everyone else’s vague irritation, interested in roses to the point of pedantry.

  Neither Lil nor Hugo, both of whom loved this garden, cared much to know the names of rose varieties. Hugo’s own garden was stocked chiefly by cuttings taken (as gifts or thefts) from the gardens of friends. To learn roses’ names from a book, and buy them in a sort of shop, were practices of the unfortunate ill-connected, the kind of people who bought their engagement rings, rather than finding them in their mothers’ jewel boxes. The Wychwood roses were propagated by cuttings from their ancestors. It pleased both the Rossiters to believe (erroneously) that the blowsy pink flowers arranged in their library were identical with, and directly related to, those that had been enjoyed there by a favourite of the first Queen Elizabeth. Lil tried to suppress the thought, but Helen’s questions about whether this was Fritz Nobis or that was Zéphirine Drouhin seemed like the outflow of a dull mind. As soon ask Cimabue what pigments he mixed into his paints: a question Antony would have found fascinating, but for which Lil – who liked to respond to art on a spiritual level, as though it were a kind of materialised ectoplasm – would have had no time.

  Sharply she changed the subject. ‘So Benjie knew Ant in Germany?’ she asked Helen.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘In Munich?’

  ‘No before that, in Berlin.’

  ‘Ant? I didn’t know he’d been in Berlin.’

  ‘Well while he was with the military police he was there.’

  Lil was silenced. It was unpleasant to learn at second hand, and from someone she had just begun to find annoying, that there were things she didn’t know about a man she thought of as her protégé and pet. Antony was younger than her, and nothing like as rich, and, being unmarried, somehow not quite adult. It was disturbing to come up against testimony to a life he led away from her, without mentioning it, a life that had been going on for years.

  ‘Was Benjie a policeman? I didn’t know.’ (Deflecting her ignorance to where it was innocuous. Benjie, being a comparatively new acquaintance, was allowed to have as-yet-unexamined passages in his past.)

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t like to talk about it much. The men he was having to round up were just boys who’d gone crazy with fear, and then even crazier with relief once the fighting was over. I think he saw shocking things, and then to come back to find all that simple-minded rejoicing.’ Helen’s voice tailed off. The simple-minded were everywhere.

  ‘So what were they doing?’ asked Lil. Christopher had spent most of his war in Whitehall, but he went to Germany after the surrender, and stayed out there until their wedding. ‘Mopping up Jerry,’ he called it. The only story he had ever told her was about flighting duck over marshes near the Baltic coast. ‘There was a chap told off to be my loader,’ he said. ‘Polite. Spoke perfect English. I asked him how he learnt it. He said he had an English tutor. Seemed a bit surprising for a keeper. And then it turned out he owned the place. I was shooting his duck on his land, with his gun. And he was loading for me. And I don’t suppose he was going to get his land back.’ The story always ended ‘Wond
er what happened to him,’ but, as far as Lil knew, Christopher had never tried to find out, and he couldn’t remember, perhaps had never known, perhaps wanted not to know, the dispossessed landowner’s name. But that was a story about a German. Who were these people Helen was talking about? ‘What boys?’ she said.

  Helen hesitated.

  Lil pressed on. ‘The boys doing shocking things.’

  They were on the shady side of the artificial dell. Lil sat on the marble bench. Helen sat beside her. Hugo propped a foot on the wrought-iron chair with its lily-of-the-valley-patterned back (rust just showing through – needs repairing – remember to mention it to Green).

  Nell stretched out on the slimy green stone beneath the bench, the women’s legs fencing her in – Lil’s smooth, bare and pale, propped on the funny rope-soled shoes she bought in France in lots of different colours (yellow was best), Helen’s in stockings with tiny tiny hairs poking through the nylon mesh. There was something horrid about stockings, the way they pretended to be invisible but weren’t. Like cut toenails, or pale rags of seaweed. Nell disliked too the little rubber bobbles of suspender belts. She didn’t didn’t didn’t ever want to have to wear such things.

  ‘Well you know,’ said Helen. ‘They’d been trained to kill Germans, and the older ones had actually been fighting, and probably they’d had brothers or friends or whatever who’d been killed.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses,’ Hugo had said to Nell. ‘If you’ve done something wrong, just own up and say you’re sorry. No one cares about your excuses. They’re just boring.’ It was when she forgot to feed her budgerigar and Dickie had shrieked and shrieked when he found it lying upside down with its little blue claws clenched. It had died because she didn’t love it – she knew that. So all the stuff she sobbed out about how she thought Heather was going to feed it, and anyway you weren’t supposed to give them too much to eat, was just nonsense. When you didn’t love things you lost them. Like the dress with the stiff frills her mother had had made for her, which was shaming and babyish and always fell off its hanger and lay scrumpled in the bottom of the wardrobe without her having done anything to make it happen, just failed to give the dress the appreciation which would have kept it safely in place. She knew not to make excuses about that too. Helen’s excuses sounded like fibs, and she hadn’t even said yet what she was making excuses for.